Handcuffed

How was it possible that an award-winning writer, very much part of the Canadian literati, could be in a relationship with a convicted murderer for more than six years?

Diane Schoemperlen, author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction, spends more than 300 pages in This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison and Other Complications asking and answering (at least in part) this question. The book, in its thoughtful style, has an obsessive momentum. It is a psychological rumination on that question while detailing, day by day, her relationship with Shane (name changed). It could be an exploitative exposé or written for a cause, but it is clear very quickly that the author is writing to work out for herself and the reader how she went so wrong so quickly and then got stuck.

Schoemperlen and Shane met at drop-in centre (Vinnie’s) for down-and-outs in Kingston while he was serving out the final years of his 30-year term at Collins Bay Minimum...